LOM D’ARCE DE LAHONTAN, LOUIS-ARMAND DE, Baron de Lahontan, esquire (he sometimes signed himself Darce, but more frequently Lahontan; the name also appears as Labontang, La Hontan and La Hontaa), seigneur of Esleix, in Canada from 1683 (?) to 1693, officer in the colonial regular troops, king’s lieutenant at Placentia (Plaisance) in Newfoundland in 1693; author of voyages, memoirs, and philosophical dialogues; b. 9 June 1666 at Lahontan (department of Basses-Pyrénées), eldest son of Isaac de Lom d’Arce and of his second wife, Françoise Le Fascheux de Couttes; d. in Europe before 1716.

Lahontan’s father, Isaac de Lom d’Arce, born about 1594, had devoted 18 years of his life and vast sums of money to deepening and straightening the mountain torrent known as the Gave de Pau, making it navigable from Pau to the port of Bayonne. Showered with honours for his achievement, Isaac de Lom d’Arce acquired the domain of Esleix and the barony of Lahontan, where he took up residence. Childless by his first wife, Jeanne Guérin, this vigorous septuagenarian had three children by his second wife before dying, heavily in debt, on 4 Nov. 1674.

Lom d’Arce’s eldest son was probably born at the château of Lahontan, and was baptized Louis-Armand de Lom d’Arce. When he was three years old, the infant Lahontan underwent on 15 July 1669 a more formal ceremony in St Martin’s church in Pau, at which were present his godfather, Armand de Gramont, Comte de Guiche and acting governor of Béarn, and a representative of his godmother, Marguerite-Louise-Suzanne de Béthune, Comtesse de Guiche. The exalted rank of the godparents attests to the social status of Lahontan’s family, which was also related to the Bragelonnes in Paris, one of whose members, Claude, had been one of the Cent-Associés.

Lahontan’s life falls unevenly into three parts: the years before he came to Canada, his ten years in North America, and his European wanderings after 1693. Of the first of these we know nothing, except that he must have heard tales of Canada, for many fishing and whaling crews set sail for Newfoundland from Bayonne, near the birthplace of Jean-Vincent d’Abbadie, Baron de Saint-Castin.

Lahontan claims to have come to Canada at the age of 17 with the three companies of colonial regular troops which left La Rochelle on the Tempête on 29 Aug. 1683 and arrived at Quebec on 7 November of that year. There is, however, no proof that he travelled on this ship or that he was an officer at this time. If, as he also asserts, he was on arrival billeted on the côte of Beaupré, he may have lived in the house of Charles Bélanger (1640–92), seigneur of Bonsecours and a prosperous settler; this hypothesis would explain Lahontan’s statement that “the Boors of those Manors live with more ease and conveniency, than an infinity of the Gentlemen in France,” and might also throw light on a bequest provided for Bélanger in a donation signed by Lahontan the following year.

In May 1684, Lahontan visited Île d’Orléans, Quebec, and its surrounding Indian villages before being sent with his company to Montreal, where Governor Le Febvre* de La Barre’s expedition against the Iroquois was being assembled. Late in June Lahontan left Montreal by canoe in the advance party led by Captain Dutast, and arrived at Fort Frontenac (Cataracoui) in mid-July. He witnessed the ill-fated negotiations at Arise de La Famine (Mexico Bay, near Oswego), in September 1684, and heard the speech of Otreouti*, “La Grande Gueule.”

The winter of 1684–85 was spent by Lahontan in garrison at Montreal, although during each winter season he managed lengthy periods of hunting with Indian parties. On 25 Nov. 1684 he signed before the notary Claude Maugue* in Montreal an autograph donation in which he appointed his widowed mother executrix of his estate and provided for numerous bequests. At the end of March 1685, he crossed the St Lawrence with a small detachment and was stationed for a month and a half at Fort Chambly, probably to exercise surveillance over fur-trading canoes. In mid-September of that year he was sent to winter quarters at Boucherville, where he appears to have remained until May 1687 except for periods spent in hunting; during the winter of 1685–86, for example, he was absent for three months while moose-hunting with a party of Indians 40 leagues north of the St Lawrence.

In June 1687 Lahontan left Montreal with Governor Brisay de Denonville’s expedition against the Senecas. Arriving at Fort Frontenac on 1 July, he was distressed to find among the Iroquois seized by Bochart de Champigny an Indian who had befriended him during La Barre’s expedition; when Lahontan protested against the treatment accorded these prisoners, he earned himself several days of confinement to his tent. He accompanied Denonville’s forces along the south shore of Lake Ontario, and on 11 July was a reluctant witness of the summary execution of the captured Canadian deserter Abel Marion, dit La Fontaine. Having participated in the skirmish which followed the Iroquois ambush on 13 July, Lahontan has left us a colourful description of the confusion among the French forces, although exaggerating the losses on both sides.

The campaign over, Lahontan hoped to return to France to settle his family affairs, but Denonville ordered him, because of his knowledge of Algonkian, to take a detachment to Fort Saint-Joseph, established on the west shore of the Sainte-Claire River the previous year by Daniel Greysolon Dulhut. Leaving Fort Niagara at the beginning of August, Lahontan and his party reached Fort Saint-Joseph in mid-September, and he took over command of the fort.

After spending an isolated winter there, he set out on 1 April 1688 for Michilimackinac, ostensibly in search of supplies for his men but probably seeking relief from boredom. He was at Michilimackinac in early May when Abbé Jean Cavelier, Father Anastase Douay, Henri Joutel, and other survivors of René-Robert Cavelier* de La Salle’s tragic expedition to the Mississippi arrived on their way back to Montreal. Here too he met Kondiaronk (The Rat), whom he was later to portray in his dialogues, and was present at the execution of the Iroquois slave turned over by Kondiaronk to Denis-Joseph Juchereau de La Ferté.

Lahontan returned to Fort Saint-Joseph only on 1 July 1688, after a roundabout journey that had carried him northward from Michilimackinac to Sault Ste Marie to recruit 40 young Ojibwa (Sauteux) braves, and thence eastward to Manitoulin Island. Hastily unloading sacks of grain at the fort, he set out southward two days later with his Ojibwa and Ottawa allies, following the south shore of Lake Erie and engaging in skirmishes with bands of Cayugas. Returning to his fort on 24 August, he learned that the garrison at Niagara had suffered badly from scurvy and that Raymond Blaise Des Bergères de Rigauville with a handful of survivors had been ordered to abandon the fort and retire to Fort Frontenac. Having sufficient supplies and ammunition for only two months, Lahontan decided that his fort could not hold out alone: on 27 August he and his men burned it and left for Michilimackinac. Reaching there on 10 September, Lahontan decided against undertaking the journey to Quebec so late in the season, but began instead to plan an exploration trip to the south.

On 24 September 1688, he set out with his detachment of soldiers and five Ottawa hunters on travels for which no documentary confirmation is available. He appears to have crossed Lake Michigan (Lac des Illinois) and to have proceeded via Baie des Puants (Green Bay) and the Rivière aux Renards (Fox River) to the Wisconsin River, which he descended to the Mississippi. He then ascended the Mississippi to a river flowing from the west which he calls the Long River (La Rivière longue) and which he claims to have explored for some hundreds of miles westward, meeting Indian tribes bearing such names as Eokoros (probably the Arikaras), Essanapes, and Gnacsitares. Returning to the Mississippi on 2 March 1689, Lahontan tells us he next paddled downstream as far as the mouth of the Ouabache (Wabash River), then back up to the Illinois River and thence by way of the Chicago portage into Lake Michigan and back to Michilimackinac, which he reached on 22 May 1689.

The trip to the Long River constitutes the most controversial episode in Lahontan’s career in North America, and despite the air of veracity with which much of the voyage is recounted, most historians have concluded that this narrative of a 4,000-mile journey made in winter and spring over frozen or swollen waterways is partly, if not largely, imaginary.

Early in June 1689 Lahontan left Michilimackinac and was never to return to the west. He reached Montreal on 9 July after a narrow escape at Sault-Saint-Louis (Caughnawaga) where Philippe de Rigaud de Vaudreuil saved him from drowning. Going on to Quebec later that summer, he was present on 12 October when Louis de Buade* de Frontenac arrived to begin his second term as governor. Having learned that the barony of Lahontan had passed out of his hands, Lahontan once again sought permission to return to France. Frontenac claimed his services, however, and, perhaps recalling his own family connections with southwestern France, offered Lahontan his table and access to his purse.

The next spring (1690) Frontenac asked Lahontan to carry offers of peace to the Iroquois, but the wily baron declined; the chevalier Pierre d’Aux (Eau), Sieur de Jolliet, was sent instead, and met the hostile reception Lahontan had foreseen. In June 1690 Lahontan, increasingly in Frontenac’s favour, accompanied the governor to Montreal and was still there in October when a message arrived that the English fleet commanded by Sir William Phips* was sailing up the St Lawrence. Following Frontenac back to the capital in haste, Lahontan fought with the French forces posted in the woods during the English landings below Quebec. After the withdrawal of the English, four French merchant ships which had hidden from the invaders arrived at Quebec, but the St Lawrence froze over before they could be turned about. By mid-November, however, a warm spell had melted the ice in the channel, and Frontenac decided to risk sending dispatches to France to report his victory. Champigny contracted on 25 Nov. 1690 with captain Jean Gancleau to pay him a generous bonus for the winter crossing and Frontenac sent Lahontan to France on the Fleur de May. The frigate sailed from Quebec at the end of November and reached La Rochelle in mid-January 1691.

Landing in France, Lahontan learned of the death of Seignelay, to whom Frontenac had given him a letter of recommendation. At Versailles Lahontan waited on the new minister, Pontchartrain, who refused his request for compassionate leave and required him to return to Quebec by the end of the summer. Indeed, Lahontan’s only satisfaction during his visit was his being promoted, on 31 May, half-pay captain of a company in Canada. In Paris he found his family affairs hopelessly entangled, and his illustrious relations, the Bragelonnes, of little help. Lahontan tells us that he was at this time received into the Order of Our Lady of Mount Carmel and St Lazarus, but no documentary confirmation of this is available. Thoroughly disillusioned by his efforts to obtain preferment, he made his way back to La Rochelle, and at the end of July set sail on the Honoré, landing at Quebec on 18 September.

With Lahontan there had travelled on the same ship the Chevalier Guillaume de Maupeou (1664-1725), a relative of Pontchartrain, whose presence at Quebec, together with that of the distinguished English prisoner John Nelson, made the winter of 1691–92 a memorable one at the Château Saint-Louis. It was apparently during this winter that Frontenac attempted to arrange a marriage between Lahontan and his 18-year-old goddaughter, Geneviève Damours, daughter of Mathieu Damours* de Chauffours, but despite the financial advantages of the match, Lahontan, after reflection, withdrew.

The following summer Lahontan resubmitted to Frontenac an earlier proposal for the arming of the western frontier by establishing a chain of three forts, one near the mouth of the Niagara River, a second at Saint-Joseph on the Sainte-Claire River and a third in Georgian Bay, the three centres to be linked by light troop transport vessels manned by 50 Basque sailors. Frontenac was at first attracted by the proposal, and authorized Lahontan to sail to France on the Sainte-Anne on 27 July 1692 to carry the idea to the court.

The Sainte-Anne put in at Placentia (Plaisance) on 18 August and waited there for a month for the Basque fishing boats she was to convoy to France. On 14 September news was received that five English ships were approaching Placentia. Governor Jacques-François de Monbetonde Brouillan prepared to defend the port and stationed Lahontan with 60 Basque sailors at an advance post called La Fontaine, less than a mile from the fort. On the 17th a landing by several boatloads of English sailors was prevented by Lahontan’s Basques. The following day Lahontan and Philippe Pastour de Costebelle were cordially received on board the English commander’s ship, the St Alban’s, to arrange an exchange pf prisoners; a day of bombardment (19 September) followed and then the English withdrew in discouragement. Thus on 6 October, for the second time in two years, Lahontan sailed for France bearing news of a French victory and of his own part in it.

After a 17-day crossing, he landed at Saint-Nazaire on 23 October and hurried to Versailles. His proposal to fortify the Great Lakes received little attention there but his gallantry at Placentia earned him admission on 1 March 1693 to the Marine guards and appointment on 15 March as king’s lieutenant at Placentia, with the perquisites of a company of 100 men. While awaiting a ship for his return to Newfoundland that spring, Lahontan tells us he had long conversations with a Portuguese doctor about the independent origin of the American Indians and their eventual salvation or damnation, questions that were to be taken up again in his Dialogues. Re-embarking at Saint-Nazaire on 12 May 1693, Lahontan captured off Newfoundland an English ship laden with tobacco before landing at Placentia on 20 June.

On his return, Lahontan was badly received by Brouillan, who was “surprised and annoyed to learn of his new appointment. Disagreements between the two men multiplied. Brouillan sent unfavourable reports to the minister, claiming that Lahontan neglected his responsibility as king’s lieutenant for the distribution of supplies, that he questioned Brouillan’s authority and disciplinary decisions, and that he tried to divert soldiers from their duties to gather his firewood. In short, wrote Brouillan, “M. de Lahontan doesn’t bother about anything here except what can contribute to his pleasures.” Lahontan, for his part, reproached his superior with inhumane treatment of his men and with profiteering, and composed “scurrilous songs” about the governor. Seeking to rid himself of the troublesome Lahontan, Brouillan slyly proposed that he be put in command of the island of Saint-Pierre. Suddenly matters came to a head: on 20 Nov. 1693, while Lahontan was entertaining guests at supper, Brouillan and his valets entered, wearing masks, and upset tables and cupboards, breaking bottles and glasses. During the next few days there were clashes between Brouillan’s valets and Lahontan’s, and Brouillan charged with desertion two of Lahontan’s soldiers who were working in the district. Despite these provocations, Lahontan took the advice of the Recollets and sought an accommodation with the governor. Fearing the consequences of Brouillan’s reports about him, however, Lahontan made a desperate decision. He tells us he paid the captain of the only ship left in port a thousand écus – an unbelievable sum for an officer earning only 90 livres a month – to carry him to Europe, and thus he fled his post at Placentia.

His North American career having abruptly ended, and a royal order having been issued for his arrest, Lahontan began at the age of 27 the European peregrinations that were to occupy the remainder of his life. Set down at Viana do Castelo in Portugal at the end of January 1694, he went from there to Oporto, Coimbra, and Lisbon, and in April sailed for Holland. After visiting Rotterdam and Amsterdam he went by boat to Hamburg, where he wrote a letter on 19 June 1694 that he never published: in it he claimed to have met there two Frenchmen who had been on La Salle’s last expedition. When Pontchartrain instructed the French resident in that city, Abbé Bidal, to investigate the story, however, no confirmation could be obtained.

That same month, Lahontan left for Copenhagen, where the French minister, François Dusson de Bonrepaus, presented him at the Danish court, and gave him letters to courtiers at Versailles. Nevertheless, when Lahontan went to Versailles in December 1694, Pontchartrain refused to receive him. A voyage to Béarn in 1695 was equally disillusioning: the château of Lahontan having been sold, the former baron found himself a stranger in his native land. While engaged in legal business visits in the neighbouring towns, Lahontan received a message that an order had been issued for his arrest, and he fled in disguise over the Pyrenees into Spain. The last letter included in his published works is dated from Saragossa on 8 Oct. 1695.

We know little of Lahontan’s last years. In 1697 he appealed unsuccessfully for reinstatement in his command “au pays des Outaouais.” A letter from M. de Bonrepaus, found in the archives of the Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, reports his presence at The Hague on 18 Sept. 1698 and his willingness to serve as a French agent in Spain for the modest sum of 400 écus a year. Two other letters, written by Lahontan to the Duke of Jovenazo on 1 and 7 Sept. 1699, confirm his return to Lisbon, whence he was forwarding to the Spanish court documents about the Mississippi. One of these was a copy of the Journal of Abbé Jean Cavelier, written in Lahontan’s own hand. By 1702 he was presumably in Holland, arranging for his Nouveaux voyages . . . to be published there early in 1703. But before the volumes were printed, he had crossed to England, where he may have composed some memoirs on North America that have been attributed to him. We then lose track of Lahontan until November 1710, when Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz mentions him as being at the court of the Elector of Hanover and in frail health. It is usually thought that Lahontan died in 1715, although no proof of this date exists beyond the fact that in 1716 Leibniz published a pamphlet written by him, apparently as a posthumous tribute.

During the decade he had spent in North America, Lahontan had not lacked opportunities to distinguish himself. He had taken part in two campaigns against the Iroquois, had twice been besieged by the English, had visited almost all parts of New France and may well have reached the Mississippi at a time when few Frenchmen had seen it. But he appears to have made little mark; except during his final months at Placentia, the official correspondence of the time scarcely mentions him.

Indeed, had Lahontan been merely an officer and traveller, his name would be forgotten today. But while serving and travelling in New France he had done something few of his fellow officers thought to do: “In the course of my Voyages and Travels, I took care to keep particular Journals of every thing . . . ,” sometimes even making notes on birch-bark. From these diaries he was able later to compose the three books which were to make him, next to Louis Hennepin, the most widely read author on North America in the first half of the 18th century.

Lahontan’s works appeared at a time when travel narratives were enjoying an extraordinary vogue in Europe and when interest in North America, aroused by the Jesuit Relations and whetted by the voyages of Hennepin and Henri Tonty, was greater than ever before.

His Nouveaux voyages dans l’Amérique septentrionale and their sequel, Mémoires de septentrionale, were published in January 1703 at The Hague and were twice pirated within a few months. A third volume, entitled Supplément aux voyages . . . and containing dialogues possibly written in collaboration in England, appeared later in 1703 in both English and French, the two earlier volumes having meantime been translated into English. New French editions were published in 1704 and 1705; the 1705 version was a considerably revised and expanded one, probably the work of the defrocked Benedictine anticlerical Nicolas Gueudeville (1650–1720), who had been living at The Hague since 1699. Other editions followed almost yearly, with a German abridgement being issued in 1709 and a Dutch one in 1710. By 1758, 25 editions or condensed versions had appeared, raising bibliographical problems which continue to puzzle bibliographers today.

Lahontan’s three volumes embraced a wide variety of subject-matter. The Nouveaux voyages . . . recounted in the then popular epistolary form his ten years in New France; midway through the narrative a letter four or five times as long as the rest told a fanciful tale of his imaginary voyage up the Long River. The Mémoires provided a lively geographical account of New France, followed by an anthropological study of its Indian inhabitants and completed by a linguistic commentary and glossary of the Algonkian language. In the third volume the travel narrative was resumed, this time in little-known European states: Portugal, Aragon, Holland, the Hansa cities, and Denmark. The remainder of the book was made up of five imaginary dialogues with an Indian chief whose name, Adario, was a partial anagram of that of the recently deceased Kondiaronk. The dialogues treated Christian belief, French laws and society, medicine, and marriage.

Lahontan’s writings, in his first two volumes at least, were based on personal observation of events and practices in New France, of Indian customs, and of flora and fauna. They included an impressive wealth of detail and, except for some exaggeration in the numbers of persons involved, were remarkably accurate in their information. The infrequent occasions on which Lahontan retailed hearsay – for example in his jesting page on the marriageable girls sent out to New France, or in his tale of the Long River – have drawn refutations which by their violence bear witness to his relative veracity elsewhere.

But Lahontan’s gifts were not merely descriptive. His identification of the eight abuses prevalent in New France is perceptive and sound. His assessment of the best method of fortifying the Great Lakes, his awareness of the loss to the colony of the talents of the Huguenots, his appreciation of the common interest of France and England in encouraging trade, his realization of the unwisdom of attempting to destroy the Iroquois, and his vision of the future greatness of North America demonstrate his powers of judgement and imagination, and his grasp of the situation in New France.

Quite apart from the information and opinions they communicated about North America, moreover, Lahontan’s works were a compendium of early 18th-century “philosophic” ideas about the folly of superstitions, the vices of European society, the illogicalities of Christian dogma and the virtues of the “noble savage.” The same ideas, better expressed, would be found in the writings of major 18th-century authors: in the fourth book of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), in Rousseau’s Discours sur les origines de l’inégalité . . . (1755), in Voltaire’s L’Ingénu (1767), or in Diderot’s posthumously published Supplément au voyage de Bougainville, More than a century after their author’s death, Lahontan’s books lived on: in Chateaubriand’s Les Natchez (1826), one of the chief figures is called Adario, and the names of all Chateaubriand’s Indian characters are taken from Lahontan’s Algonkian glossary.

In our own century, Lahontan’s works are no longer widely read, and he himself has become a shadowy figure. There is no extant portrait of him, and we know only that he was tall, lean, and pale. Proud and independent, impulsive and inconstant, he chafed under the restraints of military discipline and never accepted those of marriage. He loved the open-air life of the forests of New France, where he could please himself, spending one day with his Indian hunters and the next with Anacreon or Petronius: “a solitary Life is most grateful to me, and the manners of the Savages are perfectly agreeable to my Palate.” In Europe he led of necessity a more sociable existence: “He is witty and has a Gascon vivaciousness about him that puts him on good terms with everyone he meets . . . ,” wrote Bonrepaus, “the most responsible people open their homes to him and are delighted to have his company.” Among his admirers were two of the greatest minds of his time, Sir Hans Sloane and Leibniz.

Indeed, the pendulum of Lahontan’s life had more than once swung between solitude and society, between Europe and North America. As a youthful subject of Louis XIV he had left the Old World for the New; as an early writer of the Enlightenment he brought the New World to the Old.

We acknowledge the support of the Government of Canada through the Department of Canadian Heritage. Nous reconnaissons l’appui du gouvernement du Canada par l’entremise du ministère du Patrimoine canadien.